As you can see with this vote, elections do have consequences! Let’s not let them turn Pennsylvania into Wisconsin, no matter how many Koch-loving hacks we have in the state house: An attempt to pass a controversial amendment to a bill that would restrict union dues collection from state and school employees’ paychecks narrowly failed […]

So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live. The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect: Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street. Imagine [...]

Update: On the Occupy front, there was a march and protest in Milwaukee today in which a pregnant woman was trampled by a police horse. Condition unknown. And right now in Washington Square Park in Manhattan, the saucepans have made an appearance at the Infinite Solidarity protest. Get your saute pans ready. You can follow current events here at UStream.

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This was what happened to the Wisconsin public employees unions after their epic match with their opponents, the well funded Republican message machine:

Some people would like the Democrats to find common ground with the Republicans and go to the get together with Governor Walker. In their heads, it will look something like this:

And this is how the Republicans see it:

Any questions? Because I got the feeling that some readers were confused.

Oh, BTW, did you ever wonder why the police unions were exempted from the new rules that were imposed on the teacher’s unions and other unions? Consider this:

That’s right. You want to have the thugs on your side. In Wisconsin’s case, the thugs wouldn’t go along but that’s the general idea.

Why, yes, yes it *is* evil. Keep those images in mind the next time you see Walker’s, or any other Republican’s face on TV.

16 Responses

Labor wanted a different candidate and quite right too. Not only did the Dems run someone who had already LOST to Walker, he proceeded to ignore the central issue of the recall, and concentrate on Walker’s unproven connection to a political corruption story. I’m only surprised it was as close as it was.

Yes, it was a disaster. Clearly the parties took advantage of timing. It looks like the Democrats stalled the unions in Wisconsin by offering suggestions. They should have gone with their gut instincts and had a general strike. That would have coincided well with the Occupy movement. But just as the Wisconsin unions were taking the advice they were given to be systematic and legal, the Obama administration was using the DHS to crackdown on Occupy and break up the sites.
Now, why would the Democrats monkeywrench labor like this? Let’s think about that for awhile, shall we?

I had not thought to connect those two seemingly separate clouds of dots. It would appear that Obama is very much a bizfascist pig president and that he is using those parts of government he can use as a bizfascist pig occupation government. Would Romney be that slyly evil?

Electing Romney is a fair price to pay for defeating and removing Obama. Anyone who feels that way can certainly tell their relevant Democrats all about it. It becomes up to the Democrats to decide if that suits them just fine anyway . . . or not.

It would appear Wisconsin’s golden moment was carefully sabotaged
by the Obama Administration and by various Obamacrat agents on scene. I had not known that the unions and others in Wisconsin were talking General Strike. That sort of news does not make it to other states generally. It certainly would never make it onto the NPR airwaves, as indeed it did not. It was also shied away from by genteel lifted-pinkie Democrats who mean well in their own way I am sure. One might refer to them as NPR Democrats. Whereas the Democrats (if any) who wanted a General Strike at first might be more Free Speech Radio Democrats . . so to speak. Which of the Wisconsin DemVoters who supported Barrett in the primary realized he was an austerian stealth-Warrenite? Was there less knowledge of that out beyond Milwaukee? I hope someone studies those things.

In Arizona (yes I know…Arizona), there is a wonderful young Native American – Harvard Law Graduate – who is running for for the Democratic nomination for Congress. It’s in the area of her Native American Nation…she is young, a woman, Native American (native of the same tribe in the area she will represent), and the first Harvard Law Graduate from her tribe. You guessed it, the Democrats are endorsing one or two (in case the first one implodes!) other old-timers (one looks just like Jan Brewer!).

Democrats have been dissing women candidates all over the place this year. Remember Chelly Pingree in Maine? Loyal Dem, interested in running for Olympia Snowe’s seat. Who did the Dems back? Some independent who used to be governor.
And here in NJ, we don’t have one single female delegate to Congress. Not one. That’s just insane for a state as dense and diverse as this one.
It’s hard to believe but we might actually lose female representatives in Congress this year.

Walker didn’t attack police and firefighter unions because they tend to support more Republican candidates than other public unions and their members tend to be more conservative and vote Republican in larger percentages than teachers, social workers, etc. John Kasich, in Ohio, did lump all the public sector unions together and saw his anti-public sector union law overturned, in part, because the police and firefighter unions joined with teachers and other public workers to fight back against the man for whom many of them voted.

I have no intention of defending individual police officers who abuse their power but I will remind you that the police department in Wisconsin’s state capital refused to remove protesters from their statehouse when Walker ordered them to do so. Individual officers refused to comply and their chief supported those officers.

Good point, I think this recall was a mistake only because the unions failed to make their case to the people. I see it here time after time when the teachers strike. In a place where there would be NO middle class without unions, teachers fail time after time to get the public on their side.

I stand by my hypothesis. If you privilege one segment, you tend to get support from them and they are more likely to do your bidding. As you point out, and as *I* pointed out, the police and fire unions didn’t go along with the plan. They hung with the others in solidarity, which I think speaks very well of them.
But let’s not sugar coat this. The Republicans could have privileged the teachers or some other unions instead and left the police out to hang. But that wouldn’t have been very useful for them later, would it?
Never underestimate the Republicans to seize and opportunity to suppress their opposition.

I am reading through the comments section to the Matt Stoller NaCap post and I see a comment reminding us of something worth remembering:
“dcblogger says:
June 6, 2012 at 3:20 pm
from Athenae who lives in Wisconsin:

But before we get to all that, before the second-guessing and the post-campaign back-stabbing, before the stories from disinterested national observers about how this was all a stupid idea anyway and we should have known better, we have to appluad some people. Some people who everybody gave up on, nobody noticed, everybody made fun of, and nobody believed in.

Some people who stood at the Capitol day after day in the snow and the rain, as TV pundits yammered on about how the day of the union was over, and we’d never see a demonstration of union power in our lifetimes again.

Some people who disregarded Very Serious Advice that a recall would be too hard, and gathered a million signatures in the bitter Wisconsin winter, over the Thanksgiving holidays, while talk radio blathered about what traitors they were.

Some people who took a look at a long shot no one else wanted and said what the hell, what’s the worst that could happen? Some people who refused to listen to their own party when the party wanted nothing to do with anything that wasn’t a sure thing.

Some people who forced this fight to be a fight, this fight which should have been a fight. What Walker did should have been as hard as it was, because otherwise nobody fought back, and if there’s one thing you need when you aren’t winning, it’s the example of people who refuse to agree to be beaten.

Leaving Madison this morning, I stopped at a parking lot to look back at the city, across the lake smooth as glass. It’s my favorite sight in the world, that skyline, and this morning joggers and bikers passed on the path, in the sun, and fishermen cast their lines over the sides of their small motorboats. And I thought of a line I saw carved on a statue in Dublin, from a song called The West’s Asleep:

Be sure the great God never planned
For slumbering slaves a home so grand.

We don’t know where this ends. We don’t know how many of them will stay in politics, how long it’ll be before Walker’s actually indicted, if the Senate flip will hold, if anything else is lurking out there. We don’t know how far it reaches, how many people heard it, how many of them were changed.

This hasn’t ended, if only because things like this don’t end, and we have some people to thank for that. ”

From Long March through the Caves of Yennan to “China has stood up!” took many years. If people have the vision, they will take the time.

r u reddy, that was great. Thanks for the inspiration.
It’s such a long fight; I’ve come to the realization that the majority of Americans don’t think the way I do, nor I like them.
And I may not live long enough to see another turnaround.
If we could be sure of winning the war, losing so many battles wouldn’t hurt so much.

And here is a link to a very interesting article theorizing the existence of a tri-polar political system here in America. Worth reading and considering and wondering what to do about it in particular selected PARTS of America. Parts wherein Separate Survival may be built if a commanding majority of people in those parts decide to Build Separate Survival.http://www.correntewire.com/three_polar_politics_post_petroleum_america

“Blue States run better without Red State energy.” Sounds good. Now . . . how do we make that come true?

wankerism, the story lost me at the beginning when it made the mistake of claiming moderates claimed and ruined the label progressive. Progressive was always a moderate label. It was first used by Teddy Roosevelt. Remember the Progressive party he formed when he left the republicans? If the guys over there on the left are afraid of the term liberal and want something else to call themselves, swiping the term progressive and then claiming the moderates stole it from them, when all the moderates really did was accurately use it to describe their center left progressive agenda, then they should invent their own new term.

Now these guys want to succeed from the red states? Do they even like the blue states? Aren’t the majority of people in the blue states the racist blue collar men and women who voted for Clinton over the light bringer? Maybe what they really want is for the enlightened highly educated guilty white liberal and brown people in the cities to divide themselves from the rest of us and go post oil economy.

I haven’t studied this in any depth at all so I just vaguely remember a little history. I think two different highly unrelated groups of people used the word progressive several decades apart from eachother.
The “good government” and “government by technocratic experts” people in the 1890s to the 1920s. But then later the Communists and their fellow travelers and also many leftists in general who looked to the Communists as the ultimate standard of serious leftwing activism.
And the Communists used it to mean “people who were seeking to create more and more socialism and then Communism” specifically.
They may well have adopted the word “progressive” to hide their aims and goals. So perhaps the people who call themselves “progressive” nowadays have to study that history themselves and decide which tradition they are really trying to identify with.

Why did the word liberal become so distasteful as a self-identifier? Partly from counter-liberal psy-ops campaigns from the organized right wing and upper class to attrit liberal identifier-ship and degrade liberal influence. But also because self-identified liberals adopted various culture-aggression kicks and causes against large parts of American society such as gun “control”. Perhaps liberals for gun rights and drug rights might call themselves Darwinian Permissive Liberadicals.

The article itself certainly doesn’t call for any sort of Blue Zone seccession. It purports to offer a hopeful vision of how what it calls the “Progressives” and what it calls the “Confederates” might resume
a present-day version of the New Deal Coalition established under the FDR period for some New Deal 2.0 results. I myself suspect that functional semi-seccession of the zones without any direct fossil carbon deposits within their borders so as to craft a low-or-no fossil fuel economy within their zones may be the only way to begin withholding money and power from the coal/gas/oil complex till it and its supportive officeholders are no longer strong enough to keep the entire U S society trapped into an economy based on sky-dumping oxidized fossil carbon. But that is me, not the article.

And over the next few decades most of us will become post oil anyway as oil grows short and then grows shorter. We can either transition gracefully to something else while we still have some oil-energy to invest in whatever comes next, or we can decay chaotically as the oil runs short while we have no post-oil way of life prepared to transition to.

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